Truviso shows off dynamic database with Technorati tag cloud

Dean TakahashiMay 28, 2008 4:00 AM

Databases aren’t the most exciting technology. But Truviso has found a way to make them dynamic. Using a cool new technology, Truviso allows web companies such as Technorati to display ever-changing data on the fly.

Technorati, which indexes the blogosphere, is debuting the Truviso technology today with its live channel tag clouds. The clouds are a collection of keywords. The bigger the font, the more the keyword in blog posts. If the color is blue, that means the use of the word is on the rise, while gray means it is in decline.

That’s no big deal since many sites have their own tag clouds. But Foster City, Calif.-based Truviso has a dynamic database. It allows Technorati to update the tag cloud every five minutes rather than every day or every week. Truviso can do this with huge sets of data because it stores that data in a different way.

Roman Bukary, vice president of marketing at Truviso in San Mateo, Calif., said that most data is stuck in static databases. When you query them, the search program sifts through all of the data before it comes up with an answer. Truviso, by contrast, always has queries running. When new data arrives, it adds the data to an existing query and produces an answer right away. When you have a huge database, Truviso doesn’t bog down in a long search. That’s particularly useful to index companies such as San Francisco-based Technorati, which has terabytes of data.

One way to think about it is to consider a jar full of thousands of jelly beans. You can find out how many are in the jar by counting each one, or you can count it all once and then keep track of how many beans are added or subtracted.

Truviso was founded in 2005 by Michael Franklin, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Franklin had researched the topic for a decade and launched Truviso’s first product in 2007. It has about a dozen customers.

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Dorion Carroll, vice president of engineering at Technorati, said that the Truviso technology will let people know the pulse of the blogosphere, as ideas wax and wane. More than two million blog posts are created each day and Technorati tries to analyze those posts as soon as they go up. The company says there are more than 100 million blogs, though only 50 million to 60 million are active.

The significance of the tool goes beyond tag clouds. Anyone who needs real-time visibility into changing trends can tap to Truviso tool. You could, for instance, measure traffic every few minutes to watch its ebb and flow. Or measure the growth of crime.

Truviso has raised a $4.8 million first round of funding from Onset Ventures, Diamondhead Ventures and UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund.